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CommuniquĂŠ from an Absent Future
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we must build dense networks of solidarity based upon the recognition of a shared enemy.
These networks not only make us resistant to
recuperation and neutralization, but also allow us to establish new kinds of collective bonds. These bonds are the real basis of our struggle. We’ll see you at the barricades.
Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt.
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country without any formal coordination between groups. In the same way repetition can establish occupation as an instinctive and immediate method of revolt taken up both inside and outside the university. We have seen a new wave of takeovers in the U.S. over the last year, both at universities and workplaces: New School and NYU, as well as the workers at Republic Windows Factory in Chicago, who fought the closure I
of their factory by taking it over. Now it is our turn. To accomplish our goals we cannot rely on those groups which position
Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university
themselves as our representatives. We are willing to work with unions
is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a
and student associations when we find it useful, but we do not recognize
more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which
their authority.
We must act on our own behalf directly, without
has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is
mediation. We must break with any groups that seek to limit the struggle
for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating
by telling us to go back to work or class, to negotiate, to reconcile. This
a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the
was also the case in France. The original calls for protest were made
degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies,
by the national high school and university student associations and by
spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
some of the trade unions.
Eventually, as the representative groups
urged calm, others forged ahead. And in Greece the unions revealed
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of
their counter-revolutionary character by cancelling strikes and calling
a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these
for restraint.
remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits
As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation. The more we begin talking to one another and finding our common interests, the
and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. itself felt.
Nothing is interesting, nothing can make
The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no
more real than the windows in which it appears.
more difficult it becomes for the administration to pit us against each other in a hopeless competition for dwindling resources. The recent struggles at NYU and the New School suffered from the absence of these deep bonds, and if there is a lesson to be learned from them it is that 20
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never 1
do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without
culture of student activism, with its moralistic mantras of non-violence
ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by
and its fixation on single-issue causes.
the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we
we can be content is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production
never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly
and the certain immiseration and death which it promises for the 21st
pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety,
century. All of our actions must push us towards communization; that
then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh
is, the reorganization of society according to a logic of free giving and
world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness
receiving, and the immediate abolition of the wage, the value-form,
from place to place.
compulsory labor, and exchange.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym.
We run tirelessly in
elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.
The only success with which
Occupation will be a critical tactic in our struggle, but we must resist the tendency to use it in a reformist way. The different strategic uses of occupation became clear this past January when students occupied a building at the New School in New York. A group of friends, mostly graduate students, decided to take over the Student Center and claim it as a liberated space for students and the public. Soon others joined in, but many of them preferred to use the action as leverage to win reforms, in particular to oust the school’s president. These differences came to a head as the occupation unfolded. While the student reformers were focused on leaving the building with a tangible concession from the administration, others shunned demands entirely. They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society. We side with this anti-reformist position. While we know these free zones will be partial and transitory, the tensions they expose between the real and the possible can push the struggle in a more radical direction. We intend to employ this tactic until it becomes generalized. In 2001 the first Argentine piqueteros suggested the form the people’s struggle
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs
there should take: road blockades which brought to a halt the circulation
we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters
of goods from place to place. Within months this tactic spread across the
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from the government, the university, the workplaces, or the police. Not
of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level
because they considered this a better strategy, but because they wanted
of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after
nothing that any of these institutions could offer.
Here content aligned
graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We
with form; whereas the optimistic slogans that appeared everywhere
work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has
in French demonstrations jarred with the images of burning cars and
already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan
broken glass, in Greece the rioting was the obvious means to begin to
debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—
enact the destruction of an entire political and economic system.
80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure
Ultimately the dynamics that created the uprising also established its limit. It was made possible by the existence of a sizeable radical infrastructure in urban areas, in particular the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens. The squats, bars, cafes, and social centers, frequented by students and immigrant youth, created the milieu out of which the uprising emerged.
However, this milieu was alien to most middle-
aged wage workers, who did not see the struggle as their own. Though many expressed solidarity with the rioting youth, they perceived it as a movement of entrants - that is, of that portion of the proletariat that sought entrance to the labor market but was not formally employed in full-time jobs. The uprising, strong in the schools and the immigrant suburbs, did not spread to the workplaces.
inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.
This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since gradeschool.
Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized
surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of halftruths toward a well-rounded application profile.
No wonder we set
Our task in the current struggle will be to make clear the contradiction
about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of
between form and content and to create the conditions for the
parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to
transcendence of reformist demands and the implementation of a truly
transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know
communist content. As the unions and student and faculty groups push
that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—
their various “issues,” we must increase the tension until it is clear
that the logic here is zero-sum.
that we want something else entirely.
remains the best predictor of student achievement.
We must constantly expose
And anyway, socioeconomic status Those of us the
the incoherence of demands for democratization and transparency.
demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color”
What good is it to have the right to see how intolerable things are,
have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we
or to elect those who will screw us over? We must leave behind the
are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them.
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And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves
revolution and reform.
Its form was more radical than its content.
from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in
While the rhetoric of the student leaders focused merely on a return to
the present for others, elsewhere.
the status quo, the actions of the youth – the riots, the cars overturned and set on fire, the blockades of roads and railways, and the waves of
If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste
occupations that shut down high schools and universities - announced
our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches
the extent of the new generation’s disillusionment and rage. Despite
us how to be consumers.
Education is a commodity like everything
all of this, however, the movement quickly disintegrated when the
else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its
CPE law was eventually dropped. While the most radical segment of
purchasers into things.
One’s future position in the system, one’s
the movement sought to expand the rebellion into a general revolt
relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the
against capitalism, they could not secure significant support and the
demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And
demonstrations, occupations, and blockades dwindled and soon died.
there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded,
Ultimately the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of
consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the
reformism.
cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.
Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson
The Greek uprising of December 2008 broke through many of these limitations and marked the beginning of a new cycle of class struggle. Initiated by students in response to the murder of an Athens youth by police, the uprising consisted of weeks of rioting, looting, and occupations of universities, union offices, and television stations. Entire financial and shopping districts burned, and what the movement lacked in numbers it made up in its geographical breadth, spreading from city to city to encompass the whole of Greece. As in France it was an uprising of youth, for whom the economic crisis represented a total negation of the future.
Students, precarious workers, and immigrants were the
protagonists, and they were able to achieve a level of unity that far surpassed the fragile solidarities of the anti-CPE movement.
Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies
Just as significantly, they made almost no demands. While of course
of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting
some demonstrators sought to reform the police system or to critique
submission to the market. There is no longer the least
specific government policies, in general they asked for nothing at all
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movement will have to join with these others, breeching the walls of
felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day
the university compounds and spilling into the streets. In recent weeks
and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor
Bay Area public school teachers, BART employees, and unemployed
only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics
have threatened demonstrations and strikes. Each of these movements
collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and
responds to a different facet of capitalism’s reinvigorated attack on the
beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady
working class in a moment of crisis. Viewed separately, each appears
blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some
small, near-sighted, without hope of success. Taken together, however,
not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear
they suggest the possibility of widespread refusal and resistance. Our
attainable by credit.
task is to make plain the common conditions that, like a hidden water table, feed each struggle. We have seen this kind of upsurge in the recent past, a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society. Just two years ago the anti-CPE movement in France, combating a new law that enabled employers to fire young workers without cause, brought huge numbers into the streets. High school and university students, teachers, parents, rank and file union members, and unemployed youth from the banlieues found themselves together on the same side of the barricades. (This solidarity was often fragile, however. The riots of immigrant youth in the suburbs and university students in the city centers never merged, and at times tensions flared between the two groups.) French students saw through the illusion of the university as a place of refuge and enlightenment and acknowledged that they were merely being trained to work. They took to the streets as workers, protesting their precarious futures. Their position tore down the partitions between the schools and the workplaces and immediately elicited the support of many wage workers and unemployed people in a mass gesture of proletarian refusal. As the movement developed it manifested a growing tension between 16
Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one.
Of course I will be the star, I will get
the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.
We end up interpreting Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root. We admire the first part of this performance: it lights our way. But we want the tools to break through that point of suicidal thought, its hinge in practice. 5
The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical. The shoulder shrug, the dulled face, the squirm of embarrassment when discussing the fact that the US murdered a million Iraqis between 2003
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and 2006, that every last dime squeezed from America’s poorest citizens is fed to the banking industry, that the seas will rise, billions will die and there’s nothing we can do about it—this discomfited posture comes
We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.
from feeling oneself pulled between the is and the ought of current left
Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its
thought. One feels that there is no alternative, and yet, on the other
authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms.
hand, that another world is possible.
We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it
We will not be so petulant. The synthesis of these positions is right in
serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we
front of us: another world is not possible; it is necessary. The ought and
seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into
the is are one. The collapse of the global economy is here and now.
a declaration of war. We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt.
We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours.
Rather
than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it. The university struggle is one among many, one sector where a new cycle of refusal and insurrection has begun – in workplaces, neighborhoods, and slums. 6
All of our futures are linked, and so our 15
We seek to push the university struggle to its limits.
The university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital.
proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.
That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the II
coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal.
The modern university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital.
Its essential function is the reproduction of the
relationship between capital and labor. Though not a proper corporation that can be bought and sold, that pays revenue to its investors, the public university nonetheless carries out this function as efficiently as possible by approximating ever more closely the corporate form of its bedfellows. What we are witnessing now is the endgame of this process, whereby the façade of the educational institution gives way altogether to corporate streamlining.
Even in the golden age of capitalism that followed after World War II and lasted until the late 1960s, the liberal university was already subordinated to capital. At the apex of public funding for higher education, in the 1950s, the university was already being redesigned to produce technocrats with the skill-sets necessary to defeat “communism” and sustain US hegemony. Its role during the Cold War was to legitimate liberal democracy and to reproduce an imaginary society of free and equal citizens—precisely because no one was free and no one was equal.
But if this ideological function of the public university was at least well12
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funded after the Second World War, that situation changed irreversibly
high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We cannot
in the 1960s, and no amount of social-democratic heel-clicking will bring
be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the
back the dead world of the post-war boom. Between 1965 and 1980 profit
obvious fact that there can be no autonomous “public university” in a
rates began to fall, first in the US, then in the rest of the industrializing
capitalist society. The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism,
world. Capitalism, it turned out, could not sustain the good life it made
and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of
possible. For capital, abundance appears as overproduction, freedom
the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training
from work as unemployment. Beginning in the 1970s, capitalism entered
future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of
into a terminal downturn in which permanent work was casualized and
the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class,
working-class wages stagnated, while those at the top were temporarily
the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We
rewarded for their obscure financial necromancy, which has itself proved
cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling
unsustainable.
for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only
For public education, the long downturn meant the decline of tax revenues
autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.
due to both declining rates of economic growth and the prioritization of tax-breaks for beleaguered corporations. The raiding of the public
What this means for our struggle is that we can’t go backward. The old
purse struck California and the rest of the nation in the 1970s. It has
student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as
continued to strike with each downward declension of the business
the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the
cycle. Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university
confines of the university understood that another world was possible.
and its corollaries are subject to the same cost-cutting logic as other
Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of
industries: declining tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization
a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in
of work. Retiring professors make way not for tenure-track jobs but for
an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical
precariously employed teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers who
sections of the working class.
do the same work for much less pay. Tuition increases compensate for
tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that
cuts while the jobs students pay to be trained for evaporate.
alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the Vietnam
But their mode of radicalization, too
war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted,
insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were
many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education.
easily split off from a working class facing different problems. In the
They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to
twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by
demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended upon
capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively
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